Panormos and Milia

Skopelos is the most heavily forested island in Greece, and on the south-west coast the pines come right down to the shore. At Panormos a wide bay is enclosed by wooded headlands with a shallow, sheltered inlet at one end; a few minutes further, Milia is a long curve of white pebble with a wooded islet sitting offshore in the middle of the view.

The combination — dark green pine, white pebble, water that goes from clear to deep blue in a few metres — is unlike anywhere else in the Aegean, where the standard palette is bare rock and blue. It also solves the shade problem: the tree line comes close enough to the water that a session can move into it when the sun is high.

Both are a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive from Skopelos Town on the west-coast road, and both are pebble rather than sand, so water shoes are worth having and heels are useless. Panormos is the calmer of the two and better for families; Milia takes swell when the wind comes round, and its islet frame is best from the slope above the beach rather than from the shoreline.